From a distance, in the half-light of dawn, the city seemed restfully innocent. The sun peeked from behind a black mountain as women ambled along streets balancing baskets on their heads and children played, watched by their fathers sitting listlessly in the papaya fields.

But every step closer to the city centre brought a growing sense of dread. Then Port-au-Prince delivered its horrors, as we knew it would.
 

Turning into a road called Delmar which rises from the sea up a hill, we passed a United Nations compound - with the horrific sight of a woman’s rotting corpse lying on the pavement outside. Face masks were hastily drawn, though they could not counter the stench.

We moved on. Further up the hill, an old man waved down our car, shouting: ‘Hey, reporters, reporters, come, come.’

He led us down a side street to the flattened home of his friend Maxi Augustan, whose wife Cedanne and daughters Bedot and Zannie, aged nine and 11, lay buried beneath the rubble.

‘Come closer and listen,’ said the old man. ‘We heard one of the girls last night whispering, “I am here, help me”. But today we have heard nothing more and fear the worst. No one has come to help.’

Yesterday, the fifth since the earthquake ravaged the Haitian capital, the gap between life and death narrowed further. 

The crucial period in which most survivors are found has elapsed. The loud cries emanating from collapsed buildings, which turned to muffled moans after two days, have now given way to silence.

The Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people have died, although experts acknowledge that the true figure may be impossible to gauge. Bodies are being buried, unrecorded, in mass graves.

Yesterday, in response to the slow relief effort, hundreds of thirst-tortured survivors marched to the mountains in the hope of finding water. All they possessed - very little - they took with them. It was a pitiful spectacle.

Every street corner seemed to yield another apocalyptic vista: the once majestic Supreme Court, flattened as if by a giant boot, the cathedral in ruins, the Presidential Palace smashed to the ground.

There were bodies everywhere. On top of piles of rubble, under them, on pavements and roads.

There have been widespread reports of looting. A Christian missionary based in Port-au-Prince said she heard that three men who were roaming the streets ‘targeting reporters’ were shot dead last night in a gunfight with police.

For a while yesterday the mobile phone network sprang patchily back to life and with it came fleeting hope. 

Outside a nursing college, Ecole Nationale Des Infirmieres, Richard Ramau was trying in vain to phone his daughter Eve, who he believed was trapped inside. Eventually he gave up. It was pointless.
 

He was about to throw his phone to the ground in despair when his wife caught him in her arms and held him tight.

Some 70 girls are thought to have perished at this spot, where exercise books, certificates and reports are strewn around the rubble. Still hanging in lockers exposed by the destruction were the students’ blue and white checked uniforms.
 

Their blue bus, parked outside, was half buried. Nearby, locals urged us to look inside the remains of a small house. Just visible was a small dog, still standing guard over his dead master’s home.

Around late morning aid convoys came snaking into the city, although the general sentiment was that they are still too few.

Another bitter complaint was the lack of medics. Some survivors were airlifted by helicopter to the Dominican Republic, which shares the same island as benighted Haiti but is wealthy in comparison.

At Malenciano hospital in the border town of Jimani, Dr Joaquin Recid apologised for the victims piled up outside. ‘Yes, it breaks my heart but what can I do?’ he asked.

‘Normally we have room for 36 patients but there are 700 inside and more are arriving. We have had no help from abroad. Nothing. It is an international disgrace.’

He showed us four-year-old Jeuly Cherie who sat on her grandmother’s knee in the emergency room, wailing in agony.

She held out her bandaged left foot, repeatedly crying ‘Daddy, Daddy’ as a nurse redressed it.

Jeuly was abandoned by her mother as a baby.

Her grandmother explained that she was in her father’s house when the toes of the foot were sliced off by falling masonry. After two days she was pulled out of the house by a rescue team, although there was still no news of her father.

‘For three days she has been in terrible pain,’ said her grandmother. ‘But at least she is here now, one of the lucky ones.’

Perhaps. But it was difficult not to agree with the doctor who said, as we walked away, that amid all the horror, the memory of a child in deep pain, weeping for her father, would be the one that lingered longest of all.